Big Easy

Carnival horns blaring
Purple green and gold
Saints marching in
Slow and easy
Big Easy

A streetcar clanks down St. Charles Avenue
Beneath a live oak canopy
A tunnel of verdure
An arboreal aristocracy
Trailing grey moss beards

A white Lincoln glides down Tchoupitoulas
Cool and slow
Slow and easy
Big Easy

Ten miles away a pirogue rounds the bend
Of a back canal
Where levees weave a web of mystery
Beneath gesturing crowns
Of Cypress and live oak majesty

Birds, reptiles, and strange mammals thriving
Jen Laffite’s Captain lies peaceful
Entombed in marble and blessed
By a cutlass

Beneath moss-laden limbs
Tenebrous in the brackish breeze
Ghosts rest easy here
Lulled by the barge’s horn
And the hornbill’s cry

When I die
Let my soul drift down
The Mississippi
And I’ll rent a room in The Quarter

To swim the Jungle's stoney gate
Avoiding plastic reprobate
The redirection seldom falls
Above the black well's painted walls

Voices

The voices in the alley
Echo through the night
In our bed we forgive them
Their reckless mirth
Through the open window they sound
As if they were next to us
The stillness of the night magnifying
Their sound
All around
They sigh
They lament
And laugh
And scream
To sleep
Perchance
To dream?
Waking with a start
I wonder
Were they real?
Your slumbering form beside me
You wake with a stir
“What was that?”
“I had a dream, a woman
Stood at the edge of the bed…”
It was nothing
I said
But voices in the alley.

A Word

A Poem
A word
A thought
A sigh
A cry
A dream
A shout
A scream let out
A picture painted
With my mind
A child lonely
Left behind
A mood
A feeling
Senses reeling
A wash of color
A wisp of sound
A breath of air
Floating softly down
A moment shared
A child scared
A love despaired
A truth let out
A shooting star
A mammoth tusk
A feather
Bodies joined together
A bird let fly
A wild beast unfettered
A fish swimming free
A flower blooming
From the charnel dust
A tusk
‘tween us
A time
A life
Undone
A meaning
A word